Unofficial news and tips about Google

February 3, 2007

100,000 Videos Removed from YouTube

You'll see this message more often on YouTube, especially if you're trying to watch MTV videos. Viacom demanded YouTube to remove more than 100,000 videos that use content from Viacom's companies.

"After months of ongoing discussions with YouTube and Google, it has become clear that YouTube is unwilling to come to a fair market agreement that would make Viacom content available to YouTube users."

It's interesting that Google has a deal with Viacom that allows web publishers to display streaming video ads and video content from MTV Networks on their own sites (in a limited test, for now). Viacom also offers a lot of content in Google Video, but not for free.

Viacom is disappointed that YouTube didn't implemented the content identification system that will allow YouTube to see if a video contains fragments from Viacom, for example. This way, Viacom would get some money from the ads displayed by the online video site. "YouTube and Google retain all of the revenue generated from this practice, without extending fair compensation to the people who have expended all of the effort and cost to create it," grumps Viacom.

It seems that YouTube respected their demands and took down a lot of videos. Do a search for [vh1 live] to see for yourself.

7 comments:

Viacom is messing up big time with this. YouTube is free advertisement for their content, they should take a page from NBC's book and link the content back to it's own site where it can provide higher quality full length content and get 100% of the advertising revenue, making everyone happy... including customers.

Stripping all their content means millions of users won't get exposure to their products or advertisement and could very well never see it because many YouTube users are not television watchers...

<<According to Viacom, which owns more than 120 networks around the world, YouTube has shown clips of its television shows, music videos, movies and documentaries more than 1.2 billion times.

"We are asking to get paid," said Mike Fricklas, Viacom's general counsel, in an interview with the Mercury News. "Our content is very valuable and we think that has obviously contributed to YouTube's growth and to Google.">>

This thing about video fingerprinting. I do not believe for a second that the entertainment cartels are paying people to watch what's being uploaded on You Tube 24/7. The deal is that YouTube has a list of names. If you upload a video which has the name or tags that match their list, bang! Then they remove it and you get an automated message! YouTube will die this way. Too bad they don't realize it.

Videos that have girls naked and girls that show too much of their own body. It's just really something not Healthy for children. It's really suggestive to people of how they think about things. Please take action now.